PONTECORVO, BRUNO• 425more for $300. There was no proof that Pontecorvo wasquantum,
however, nor that he had been in contact with the Soviets during the
six years he had spent working on the heavy-water pile at Chalk
River between 1943 and 1948, nor afterwards at Harwell.
Pontecorvo had trained in Rome under Enrico Fermi, then from
1935 in Paris alongside Hans von Halban and Lev Kowarski at Joliot-
Curie’s Radium Institute and later at the Colle`ge de France. He left
France in July 1940. General Pavel Sudoplatov has alleged that Pon-
tecorvo was cultivated in Rome before the war by the illegalrezident,
Grigori Kheifets, and then contacted by Lev Vasilevsky, the Mexico
Cityrezidentworking under diplomatic cover, in January 1943: ‘‘At
the end of January 1943 we received through Semyonov a full report
on the first nuclear chain reaction from Bruno Pontecorvo, describing
Enrico Fermi’s experiment in Chicago on December 2, 1942.’’ Quite
how Pontecorvo might have gained access to this highly classified
breakthrough is unexplained, for at the time he was working for an
oil survey company in Oklahoma, having arrived in New York as a
refugee in August 1942 from Lisbon aboard the S.S.Quanza, and he
was not invited to join the British contingent to the Manhattan Project
in Montreal until after January 1943. Nevertheless, Sudoplatov is
emphatic that Vasilevsky ‘‘was the first intelligence officer to ap-
proach Pontecorvo directly in 1943.’’
Pontecorvo made no reference to these events when he held a press
conference in Moscow in March 1955, but before he died in 1993, at
the Soviet nuclear research center at Dubna outside Moscow, he gave
an interview to a Russian journalist in which he acknowledged his
wartime espionage and confirmed that he had defected because he
feared his arrest was imminent. After his disappearance in 1950, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) conducted an intensive in-
vestigation to see if it had overlooked any evidence of his espionage.
It found that its original file was very thin, having been originated
in November 1942 during a routine random search of Pontecorvo’s
apartment in Tulsa on a warrant describing him as a suspected enemy
alien. The search showed only a collection of books on Communism
and a few dust jackets bearing swastikas, but nothing incriminating.
However, by the end of the FBI inquiries in 1950, his dossier had
grown to 1,011 pages.